1922 was early days for "Fundamentalists," a self-named group of reactionary American Protestants assembled around a series of pamphlets ("The Fundamentals," 1910-15) that rejected evolution and historical biblical criticism, but Fosdick was prescient in seeing their threat to pluralistic democratic society. And while he was driven from the Presbyterian Church by critics of the tolerant "modernism" he advocated, his side seemed to have prevailed. He was soon speaking at an even bigger pulpit, at the Riverside Church built by his supporter John D. Rockefeller, while the Fundamentalists were humiliated by the carnival of ignorance, mendacity and bigotry around the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
100 years on, it isn't so clear. The Fundamentalists didn't disappear but turned inward, building their own anti-modern theological world, bursting back into national politics in the 1980s and going from strength to strength ever since. The progressive writer and scholar Diana Butler Bass, who grew up in the Evangelical (though not Fundamentalist) world and still tries to speak to it, has published a set of reflections this week whose upshot is: Shall the Fundamentalists Win? A Century After the Question: They Have.
Butler Bass' focus is on the struggles within the Protestant churches between fundamentalists and modernists - though, she shows, terms have shifted and shifted so now "Evangelicals" and "mainline Protestants" describe the sides better. And in that battle, Fosdick's confidence that the fundamentalists couldn't prevail seems mistaken. In her reflections, Butler Bass, traces changes in nomenclature and affiliation, develops a theory that fundamentalist culture is shaped by the dynamics of theological and social shame, and urges us to get beyond a scholarly debate over whether "fundamentalism" is a specific American Protestant thing or a broader global phenomonon which appears in many religions - and even in non-religious movements.
.jpg)
[T]hese days I also find myself dissatisfied with this framing. One seems too narrow, limited in scope to a specific Protestant tradition. The other seems so broad that it makes the term nearly useless. What is fundamentalism now? Only those conservative Protestant movements that take the Bible literally and believe in the Rapture? Any religious reactionary movement that emerges across the globe?
If it is anything at all, fundamentalism is a profound commitment to an ordered, hierarchical universe. ... Fundamentalism isn’t just a world-view of the universe, not as a belief that gives meaning to the universe, but fundamentalism is an order and hierarchy deemed to be the very nature of created existence. To fundamentalists this is credo, a reality that demands utter devotion — that sacred orderliness is essential to the continued existence and well-being of everything, especially to human society. ...
There is nothing random, nothing tangential, nothing unplanned, and nothing that can ultimately thwart God’s order. For order is God’s will for human society. Anything outside of the sacred order is considered impure, rebellious, or sinful. A good life, a faithful community is well-ordered. Harmony, submission, obedience, knowing and accepting one’s place — these are markers of being in line with the divine design. ...
Fundamentalism is far more than reactionary religion or anti-modernism; more than an evangelical who is mad about something; more than anyone to the right of you; and more than someone with a rigid opinion. Fundamentalism is a kind of religious “physics” — a claim on reality to know how the universe was created, how it behaves, and its origin and ends. In effect, it is a rival “science” with a rival polity to other sciences (like actual physics or biology) and other polities (like democracy or socialism). But fundamentalists don’t see it as a rivalry. They are simply right. Everyone else is wrong.
Because of this, fundamentalism is inherently authoritarian. Unlike other sciences, it isn’t understood as a theory. And unlike other polities, it cannot be flexible.
It's a gloomy view but she knows whereof she speaks. I think the "rival 'science' with a rival polity" view is illuminating and disturbing. I'm already planning on including the idea that "Fundamentalism is a kind of religious 'physics'" in next spring's iteration of "After Religion." (I'll want to bring in ecofeminist ideas, too, showing that the hierarchical "physics" in question has deep roots in western civilization going back to Plato and Aristotle, along with the idea that its fundamental [sic!] hierarchy is gender rather than theology. By that time theories of "fascism" may have converged with this thinking, too...) She notes that fundamentalist churches are losing members (especially young people) but that doesn't mean their influence has waned.
However, if you think of fundamentalism as a structure of reality, a hierarchy of authority mobilizing to defeat the forces of disorder and chaos in favor of God’s design, well, the picture changes. Authoritarians around the world appeal to divine sanction, recruiting the devout as foot soldiers in a larger spiritual and political war.
The more threatened some people feel, the more fundamentalism grows. The more people question the authority of conventional politics and religion, the more authoritarian those same institutions become. And the threats — from every front — are plentiful. The more chaos, the more need for control. We’re in a vicious cycle of victimization and crusade, the very cycle that fuels fundamentalism. There are not only American Protestants fundamentalists now. There are fundamentalists everywhere. And that’s what is.
Shall the fundamentalists win?
A hundred years ago, Fosdick confidently proclaimed: “I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed.”
Shall the fundamentalists win? I confess that I do not share his certainty. I do not know if they will ultimately win, but they are — right now — stronger than ever.
And that worries me — and inspires me to keep on going.
